Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday April 12, 2012 @12:29PM
from the playing-the-blame-game dept.

redletterdave writes "In March, a 51-year-old Reddit user named 'Black Visions' wrote his last post on Reddit. He had been writing frequently about depression and suicide, but in his last post where he also threatened his own suicide, others decided to egg him on even further. That turned out to the be the last straw: Seattle news soon reported Jerry had jumped eight stories from a hotel room in the Double Tree in Tukwila, Washington. Reddit announced on Wednesday that the user's sister Sandy has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against nine Reddit users who egged him on, and Reddit has also been subpoenaed in identifying the information of another three individuals."

The people involved did a despicable thing. But I can't see how it's any more illegal than someone shouting "Jump!" at someone on a roof top when emergency services are trying to talk them down.

The difference is simple. It's in writing, here. There's money to be made.

I don't quite follow your point...are you saying that Reddit's business model encourages people to egg others on to cause suicide, because it was in writing? I don't follow how that's true at all. The people egging him on were commenters, who don't get paid to comment. And if you read the actual comment thread, you'll see that there were quite a few people trying to talk him out of it as well; did they all cause Reddit to lose money, or have to pay to post their comments?

are you saying that Reddit's business model encourages people to egg others on to cause suicide, because it was in writing?

No, I think he is saying that there is money to be made in suing those posters, as opposed to trying to sue someone who yells "jump" at someone on a building. It is easier to track down the commenters, than it would be to find the one person who egged on a jumper in a huge crowd of people.

But, but, this was on the Internet! That means activists who block access to establishments and graffiti artists spend over a decade in jail, and anyone who egged on a suicide should be sued for wrongful death! THIS IS SERIOUS BUSINESS!

It's not illegal. A 'wrongful death' lawsuit is a civil action, not a criminal one. In this country, you can be sued for anything. I can sue you for pointing out that suing people for stupid shit is stupid, or because you have a lower slashdot ID than I do. I'm perfectly serious here; citation [wikipedia.org]

Of course, you'd never get a lawyer to represent you since there is no money in it and they'd probably be sanctioned. And if you tried to represent yourself you could actually be fined, countersued, and even held in contempt of court for a frivolous lawsuit - which *is* a criminal offense...

Why? If your life is that bad, maybe it's good advice to tell you to end it. No sense being in pain every day. If you have some ideology that every life should be extended as long as possible no matter what, that's fine, but not everyone shares it. Some people's lives suck, and it's theirs to end if they wish.

The problem I have with this litigation is the detachment of the accused. While they may have made some insensitive, immature and inappropriate comments -- they had no real sense of the situation and behaved much as many other immature and insensitive internet forum users may have acted -- who hasn't seen plenty of posts made in jest saying "Do it faggot!" "AN HERO!"?

It's hard to know if a post on a forum is made in jest, a troll or is actually the real deal. Expecting everyone to behave and act to every fo

On the internet, nobody knows if you are who you say you are. You could really be a depressed person, or you could be a 7 line perl script. You could be talking to a real 15 year old girl, or it could be an FBI agent. Then there's products like Siri, cleverbot, etc., that blur the line even further. But even if that problem could be 'solved', there is no way to know whether an internet identity is a single person or a group.

So given that identity is not provable online, why should people act like it is? Also, if you don't mod this post +5, I'm going to hang myself with a power cord.

I think they should be charged as accessories to the death, just as happens if you help a gangster find the address of a guy who owes him money. You didn't do the killing yourself but you did help accomplish the task.

> So basically, you think we need more laws, because there are no laws for this.

Why would you reach this conclusion? He mentioned the premise (IANAL so I don't know the statute) that this could fall under.

> It is a civil matter. No crime was.

Your criteria for uncivil behavior versus criminal activity is pretty extreme. It is not just irresponsible to knowingly state "yeah go ahead and drink that transmission fluid/poison, it's delicious" to an anonymous (potentially a minor or mentally handicapped i

Your whole post flies in the face of the fact that no criminal action was taken (because, as I asserted, no law was broken). This is a civil tort. I could sue you right now for your post. I'd lose, but I could. Torts can be done for any reason. Wrongful death being the reason. You could hurt my feelings, I kill myself, sue you for wrongful death. You'd have to pay a lot of money to not lose, too. i'm gonna go do that now {JOKE! JOKE! I'M JOKING!}

> Your whole post flies in the face of the fact that no criminal action was taken

I appreciate your understanding of tort law. No charges were filed. There's a distinction to be made between that and no criminal action. The District Attorney (ostensibly his office) has discretion and will often not try cases where theres an element of uncertainty. Everyone wants to get re-elected. In another jurisdiction, the event would have been sufficient for a criminal charge. My assertion is that this is part of a fu

It depends. If they haven't had children and they commit suicide there would be fewer people like them. After enough generations there might be significantly fewer suicides for those scenarios. And so many more deaths would be avoided in the long run.So the question is whether we really want to select for the trait of "not committing suicide when depressed even when being egged on to suicide".

We might prefer to reduce the number of people who would egg on suicidal people. That might reduce even more deaths

I'm sorry but the real troll here is the author of this post. The person in the article is not black_visions.

Black_visions made that post Friday 03/09/12 at 5:37 UTC. We're being told that he killed himself that night. Yet, the news report says the person committed suicide on the Tuesday the 13th of March at a hotel. The sister says "a little over a month ago." Today is the 11th of March, not yet the one month mark looking the police report with the incident occurring 03/13/12 at 12:42 pm. Case number 12-1762

Only one man fits the description of the guy in the article: Culver, William M, 51 of Shoreline, March 13 died in King County, WA. The rest of the obits for the area are here.

Someone pulled this same exact stunt in/r/foreveralone a few months ago. Here was the original post from a guy saying he was going to kill himself. Here is the follow up post from his "sister". It's clearly fake, and I'd be willing to bet it's same troll as the one behind this.

EDIT: One more thing. Black_visions on a weekend night. The guy who died did it on Tuesday afternoon. That means that if it is the same guy, then the man waited 3 and a half days to kill himself after he made his post. By then the bullying posts were gone- they were deleted that same night by qanan - so unless he took screenshots of the comments as they were made and sent them to his sister, she couldn't have seen them.

So wait.. are you saying that because I don't know if the person I'm talking to is genuinely in distress that gives me the right to make fun of them? There are laws against cyberbullying precisely because of things like this. People are complete assholes on the internet when they think they are safe and anonymous, and they say or do things they would never consider doing in person. I doubt the Reddit posters would stand outside a building and tell a jumper to jump... but when it's just an internet post it's

You're right. Wrongful death shouldn't be a crime, civil or criminal. You were either responsible for someone's death, in which case you can be held accountable, or you were not. Being complicit in terms of having the means to stop a death is not necessarily actionable either. To compel me to do something is akin to slavery, which is outlawed in this country (but something the government can do at the point of a gun, wtf?).

The article cites a user-made post, not an official statement by reddit. Multiple people on reddit, including comments on the cited SubredditDrama post, have pointed out that there is no hard evidence that
-Black Visions killed himself
-Sister of Black Visions is actually Black Vision's sister
-That there is any subpoena or legal action being pursued
Get back to me after there's real evidence of any of those things.

Seattle P-I's list of deaths for that week [seattlepi.com] includes a 51-year-old man who died on March 13, but his name was William M Culver, not Jerry. It appears the poster fit their story to match that article, knowing that people would find it.

His final posts can be read on http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/qoixk/a_lot_of_trolls_tonight/ [reddit.com]
Looking through it I get the sense that people were trying to reach out and tried to persuade him from killing himself. TFA makes it sound as though everyone was cheering him on. Those few who trolled got severely downvoted.
I can't see how reddit nor its users are in any way responsible for his death. Rather seems like his family is out to find a scapegoat. Where were they when he needed help and support?

It looks like the guy being sued (AlyoshaV) simply didn't read the post till the end (where the suicide note was), and commented on partial post with some stupid joke.Had he read the post till the end, the suit could be avoided (probably not the suicide).

This should be an important message to all slashdotters: always read all posts in their entirety before commenting. Always RTFA thoroughly till the very end, or you could be the next murderer.

If this poor fellow was actually pushed over the brink by a few reddit comments, he was standing awfully close to it. I don't think the commentators should be held culpable since a normal person wouldn't be fazed by such things. Outright harrassment or threats aside, legislating human interaction on that level would be too subjective.

What proof, beyond reasonable doubt, is there that he would not have jumped if those people wouldn't have egged him on? If just a few people wriitng mean things on an Internet forum would cause people to jump from buildings, the Internet would be the primary cause of death and facebook would have been sued bankrupt a long time ago. Unless there is irrefutable proof that these posts have a direct significant relation to the death of this person, there is no damage to be claimed.

Comments on Reddit point out that-- This has happened before in other places with a fake sister-- the suicide was committed by jumping off a building, while the user threatened to commit suicide by shooting himself-- the suicide happened several days after the nasty replies were deleted-- the user's real name was supposedly Jerry, but the name of the man who killed himself was William.

Furthermore, carefully reading the Reddit link itself, Reddit has not received a subpoena. Rather, Reddit has been *told by the supposed sister of the user* that they *will be subpoenaed* in the future; at no point does Reddit claim to have actually received the subpoena. As a bonus, the man's supposed sister claims "We were told by our lawyer not to give any other information out such as our full names or the people to be named in the lawsuit", which makes her claims immune to verification.

It's quite likely that some troll saw a suicide in the newspaper and decided to claim that the suicide was connected when they were really just trolling. Ruling that out would require having the subpoena, not just having a claim that one was sent.

"The scandalous wave of creativity following the judges declaring a chatbot winner in a competition after the human test subject hung himself in the keyboard cable led to a much-applauded change in the rules where nastiness was declared not to be a sign of intelligence."

By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising...kill yourself. Thank you. Just planting seeds, planting seeds is all I'm doing. No joke here, really. Seriously, kill yourself, you have no rationalisation for what you do, you are Satan's little helpers. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show. Seriously, I know the marketing people: 'There's gonna be a joke comin' up.' There's no fuckin' joke. Suck a tail pipe, hang yourself...borrow a pistol from an NRA buddy, do something...rid the world of your evil fuckin' presence. -- Bill Hicks

Nobody should expect any more than this from the site that Reddit has become. I mean, this was a site that for as long as possible allowed child predators and pedophiles to run amok with no regulation or oversight, and then only did something about it when it threatened to become a public relations nightmare. They still allow subreddits about disgusting material to operate in that manner, including one glorifying pictures of dead children.

Christ.. another "there ought to be a law against (x)", or "(x) ought to be a crime"? Seriously, there are too many of your types out there screwing things up already. We keep making dumb laws that have rather nasty unforeseen consequences because some people get their panties in a twist over some distasteful, "deviant", or irksome behavior.

Yeah, those guys were assholes. They showed a severe lack of humanity and empathy. They are worthy of criticizing, shunning, and shaming. But that doesn't mean it should become illegal to be an unsavory prick. Putting people in prison because they are assholes hiding behind the anonymity of the internet is bullshit.

> Putting people in prison because they are assholes hiding behind the anonymity of the internet is bullshit.

Those are some strong words. That sentiment is also backward. The statements were knowingly made and potentially harmful. If a person can be prosecuted for sitting on a bench alongside another person (reddit or any open forum) then telling that person (who may be of limited capacity - minor, mentally handicapped or ignorant) to do something dangerous, this is simply an extension of existing societ

Of course, all of you are for free speech except when it's speech you don't agree with.

You are arguing that this man (if really existed and not just a troll) had a mental illness serious enough that he lacked the capacity of rational thought. In that case, he should have requested medical help and possibly put under care. Since none of those have happened, he maintained the responsibility for his own actions.

Really? You can't see any way somebody shouting, "I'm gonna kill myself, I'm gonna kill myself," while perched on a 10th floor ledge actually jumping to their death could be, in any way, related to a crowd of fuckwads on the ground laughing, pointing, and shouting, "Jump! Jump you faggot!"? The presence of a crowd of people who are not only not concerned, but are actively encouraging the person to kill themselves - and you don't think that might have a negative influence on their receptiveness to a couns

Being clinically depressed isn't an excuse for not being responsible for your actions - as far as I know. If you murder someone, it's not a defense to say that you were clinically depressed and not responsible for what you do. Thousands or millions of people can be clinically depressed.

Nevertheless, if you're saying they're not responsible for their actions, then they're not to be treated as adults and shouldn't be allowed on the Internet in the first place. They should be in a safe secluded area like

And aren't the people egging him on also adults, and shouldn't they be responsible for their actions? What if their actions include inflicting additional pain on an already-mentally-disturbed individual, perhaps even so much pain that it pushes him across the line from "only suicidal ideation" to "immediate action on those ideas?"

I suspect this issue of "personal responsibility" in this matter is not as cut & dried as you'd like to pretend i

Only physical pain matters. Mental pain cannot be punished because it's not verifiable. It's not measurable. You can't prove a causal relationship. You can't prove that he wouldn't have committed suicide if they hadn't said that.

The law provides a defense against physical attacks. You're expected to fend of mental attacks by yourself.

Yes those egging him on were adults. And they're assholes. Assholes face the consequences of people not liking them. That's it. No government imposed consequences can

Except that's completely wrong. Civil suits commonly include damages for "pain and suffering," which is actual, quanitifiable punishment for "mental pain," far beyond the "I was out of work for 2 weeks." It is, specifically, a way of assigning a dollar value as a punishment for causing "mental pain."

You may not be able to go to jail for "mental pain," (well, unless it's a hate crime, or domestic abuse, or...) but the law very much makes allowances

Mental pain and trauma have to usually arise from a real criminal act in the first place. They're secondary effects attached to something more substantial. Give me a case where a person had to pay ONLY for mental trauma with no other offence involved - like libel, criminal malpractice, unfair discrimination etc.

"Jerry had a fairly troubled past, and had been suicidial before those final few days of his life," Sandy said. "His ex-wife, who is the mother of his disabled 20 year old daugther, took a lot of his money for support and never let Jerry see his daughter.

What I'd like to know is how can 9 assholes on reddit saying "right on, do it" be more responsible for his depression-fueled suicide than that woman. Honestly, I can't comprehend that line of "reasoning".

That's why/b/ doesn't keep a record of its posts - by the time a family member would react to something like this, the post would already be gone. And even then, the people are posting as anonymous anyway.

There's a difference between not doing anything and intentionally making a medical condition worse.

If you're having a severe asthma attack on the street, the decent thing for me to do would be to call an ambulance. Just walking on by is not decent, but it's also not a crime (unless I'm a medical provider). But blowing cigar smoke in your face hoping that I can make your condition worse so that you keel over? That's different.

Asthama is a physical condition. Laws deal with physical harm, not mental harm to adults. No one cares about anyone's feelings and the law shouldn't care either. Adults are expected to take care of their own brains.

There are numerous laws dealing with mental and emotional duress so yes, this is an area of law.

Someone who is capable of committing suicide cannot "take care of their own brain". Knowingly harassing someone in such a condition and causing them to carry out the suicide is at best manslaughter due to gross negligence.

Obviously if someone had a gun to their own head, was in clear duress and you encouraged them to pull the trigger you would be going to jail (a good lawyer could p

Clearly you don't suffer from clinical depression. It's a whole different reality from the common human experience. Under such a condition you can easily loose your free will to a great roaring abyss that you clearly don't understand and I hope you never do. That's why people like this need help and are easily coerced into yet darker and colder places. He didn't jump. He was pushed by the growing darkness consuming his mind, rational thought, and free will.

Then why was he allowed on the Internet at all if he wasn't in possession of his senses? If you enter a place where regular adults are interacting, they're going to treat you like an adult as well. And that includes being responsible for your actions.

If this guy was clinically unable to take responsibility, he should either be in a mental hospital, or in the care of guardians who don't allow him access to the Internet.

Yeah, but that's harrassment and/or physical abuse. This is more like if I'd walk up to a complete stranger and tell them about my problems, and they'd smugly say "You know what? You do that." That shouldn't be illegal, since I was the one who instigated the conversation and bothered the person in the first place. The analogy doesn't really hold water since we're talking about a public forum, but the principle still holds.

"Now, when you are in the military and your commander tells you to go kill yourself in a roundabout way: "Soldier, go over there, secure that position and stay there", and you do it, then it's an order, of-course that's a different situation, the soldier knew he could get killed because of orders (but even in the military there are bounds of reason that cannot be crossed, a soldier shouldn't be complying with illegal orders for example)."

and thats why in the UCMJ there is a buncha pages about commanders not